
Mother Emanuel
Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed

Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $24.30
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
William DeMeritt
-
By:
-
Kevin Sack
About this listen
A sweeping history of one of the nation’s most important African American churches and a profound story of courage and grace amid the fight for racial justice—from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kevin Sack
“A masterpiece . . . a dense, rich, captivating narrative, featuring vivid prose . . . expansive, inspiring and hugely important.”—The New York Times
“Race, religion, and terror combine for an extraordinary story of America.”—Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., bestselling author of Begin Again
Few people beyond South Carolina’s Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston—Mother Emanuel—before the night of June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered the church’s charismatic pastor and eight other worshippers. Although the shooter had targeted Mother Emanuel—the first A.M.E. church in the South—to agitate racial strife, he did not anticipate the aftermath: an outpouring of forgiveness from the victims’ families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted Charleston and the South since the earliest days of European settlement.
Mother Emanuel explores the fascinating history that brought the church to that moment and the depth of the desecration committed in its fellowship hall. It reveals how African Methodism was cultivated from the harshest American soil, and how Black suffering shaped forgiveness into both a religious practice and a survival tool. Kevin Sack, who has written about race in his native South for more than four decades, uses the church to trace the long arc of Black life in the city where nearly half of enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Through the microcosm of one congregation, he explores the development of a unique practice of Christianity, from its daring breakaway from white churches in 1817, through the traumas of Civil War and Reconstruction, to its critical role in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.
At its core, Mother Emanuel is an epic tale of perseverance, not just of a congregation but of a people who withstood enslavement, Jim Crow, and all manner of violence with an unbending faith.
©2025 Kevin Sack (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Mother Emanuel is a masterpiece . . . Sack, a former reporter for The New York Times, delivers a dense, rich, captivating narrative, featuring vivid prose, prodigious research and a palpable emotional engagement that is disciplined by a meticulous attention to the facts. His excavation is an essential addition to existing histories and ought to be recognized as a singular journalistic performance . . . [Sack’s] pages teem with information often eloquently conveyed, leaving his readers as enthralled as he is with his expansive, inspiring and hugely important subject.”—The New York Times
“All at once Kevin Sack’s Mother Emanuel is harrowing, despairing and inspiring. From a moment-by-moment account of the evening of the massacre to a final, brilliant discussion of the meaning of forgiveness in Christianity and other traditions, Sack writes lyrically, from deep research, and with an unforgettable message about tragedy and resilience.”—David W. Blight, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“[Mother Emanuel is a] searching history of the Charleston church brought into the headlines by mass murder . . . A sobering, expertly told history of the struggle for equality as waged from pulpit and pew.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
The Catch
- A Novel
- By: Yrsa Daley-Ward
- Narrated by: Yrsa Daley-Ward
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life.
By: Yrsa Daley-Ward
-
The Science of Revenge
- Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction—and How to Overcome It
- By: James Kimmel Jr. JD
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Although this behavior is ancient and seems inevitable, by understanding retaliation and violence as an addictive brain-biological process, we can control deadly revenge cravings and save lives. In The Science of Revenge, Yale violence researcher and psychiatry lecturer James Kimmel, Jr., JD, uncovers the truth behind why we want to hurt the people who hurt us, what happens when it gets out of hand, and how to stop it.
-
When It All Burns
- Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
- By: Jordan Thomas
- Narrated by: Jordan Thomas
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots—the special forces of America’s firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on earth. Thomas viscerally renders his crew’s attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain. He uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires, revealing how humanity’s symbiotic relationship with wildfire became a war—and what can be done to change it back.
-
-
Smart, Authentic and Needed
- By Watch Hill on 06-03-25
By: Jordan Thomas
-
We Don't Talk About Carol
- A Novel
- By: Kristen L. Berry
- Narrated by: Nicole Cash
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the wake of her grandmother's passing, Sydney Singleton finds a hidden photograph of a little girl who looks more like Sydney than her own sister or mother. She soon discovers the mystery girl in the photograph is her aunt, Carol, who was one of six North Carolina Black girls to go missing in the 1960s. For the last several decades, not a soul has talked about Carol or what really happened to her. But now, with her grandmother gone and Sydney looking to start a family of her own, she is determined to unravel the truth behind her long-lost aunt’s disappearance.
By: Kristen L. Berry
-
The Gunfighters
- How Texas Made the West Wild
- By: Bryan Burrough
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.
-
-
Hits the target
- By S. S. Felzenberg on 06-09-25
By: Bryan Burrough
-
So Far Gone
- A Novel
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around—except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep.
By: Jess Walter
-
The Catch
- A Novel
- By: Yrsa Daley-Ward
- Narrated by: Yrsa Daley-Ward
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life.
By: Yrsa Daley-Ward
-
The Science of Revenge
- Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction—and How to Overcome It
- By: James Kimmel Jr. JD
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Although this behavior is ancient and seems inevitable, by understanding retaliation and violence as an addictive brain-biological process, we can control deadly revenge cravings and save lives. In The Science of Revenge, Yale violence researcher and psychiatry lecturer James Kimmel, Jr., JD, uncovers the truth behind why we want to hurt the people who hurt us, what happens when it gets out of hand, and how to stop it.
-
When It All Burns
- Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
- By: Jordan Thomas
- Narrated by: Jordan Thomas
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots—the special forces of America’s firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on earth. Thomas viscerally renders his crew’s attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain. He uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires, revealing how humanity’s symbiotic relationship with wildfire became a war—and what can be done to change it back.
-
-
Smart, Authentic and Needed
- By Watch Hill on 06-03-25
By: Jordan Thomas
-
We Don't Talk About Carol
- A Novel
- By: Kristen L. Berry
- Narrated by: Nicole Cash
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the wake of her grandmother's passing, Sydney Singleton finds a hidden photograph of a little girl who looks more like Sydney than her own sister or mother. She soon discovers the mystery girl in the photograph is her aunt, Carol, who was one of six North Carolina Black girls to go missing in the 1960s. For the last several decades, not a soul has talked about Carol or what really happened to her. But now, with her grandmother gone and Sydney looking to start a family of her own, she is determined to unravel the truth behind her long-lost aunt’s disappearance.
By: Kristen L. Berry
-
The Gunfighters
- How Texas Made the West Wild
- By: Bryan Burrough
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.
-
-
Hits the target
- By S. S. Felzenberg on 06-09-25
By: Bryan Burrough
-
So Far Gone
- A Novel
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around—except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep.
By: Jess Walter
-
Murderland
- Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
- By: Caroline Fraser
- Narrated by: Patty Nieman
- Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?
By: Caroline Fraser
-
What Kind of Paradise
- A Novel
- By: Janelle Brown
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim, Helen Laser
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.
-
-
Wow
- By Lacey Murillo on 06-09-25
By: Janelle Brown
-
Little Bosses Everywhere
- How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America
- By: Bridget Read
- Narrated by: Nikki Massoud
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny postwar California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the devoutly religious suburbs of Michigan, where the industry built its political influence, to stadium-size conventions where today’s top sellers preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffett, and President Donald Trump, all while eroding public institutions and the social safety net.
-
-
Well researched.
- By Donald Schuster on 05-08-25
By: Bridget Read
-
The Listeners
- A Novel
- By: Maggie Stiefvater
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of high society’s troubles. Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skillfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile.
-
-
Concept Fully Realized
- By P Chez on 06-08-25
-
The River Is Waiting
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: Jeremy Sisto
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees his light and some of his fellow offenders, including a tender-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen desperate for a role model.
By: Wally Lamb
-
How to Lose Your Mother
- A Daughter's Memoir
- By: Molly Jong-Fast
- Narrated by: Molly Jong-Fast
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
-
-
Should have used a professional actor to read it
- By Kate Derickson on 06-05-25
By: Molly Jong-Fast
Needed truth
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.